About This Guide

The Infrastructure Planning and Design (IPD) Guide for Dynamic Datacenter provides actionable guidance for designing a Dynamic Datacenter infrastructure. Delivering dynamically scalable IT resources can provide dramatic benefits to nearly all aspects of your organization’s IT environment. The design process in the Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide for Dynamic Datacenter allows your organization to strategically plan a Dynamic Datacenter infrastructure that is designed for ease of manageability.

Key benefits of the guide include:

The infrastructure is designed using best practices to reduce the administrative burden of managing the Dynamic Datacenter.

A single set of requirements is traced throughout the entire design process and is then transferred to the appropriate supporting Infrastructure Planning and Design guides.

The infrastructure design of the virtualization hardware and the management software includes determining the scaling and architectural limits of each component.

With this guide, you can design a Dynamic Datacenter infrastructure that will allow your organization to be responsive to changing market conditions by presenting new ways to develop, deliver, deploy, and manage applications and IT infrastructures.

Figure 1. Decision flow chart

In More Detail

The Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide for Dynamic Datacenter includes the following five-step process:

Step 1: Determine the Dynamic Datacenter Scope. The goal of this step is to define the scope and determine the workloads that will be included in the Dynamic Datacenter project. Step 1 consists of determining the proposed initial workloads for the Dynamic Datacenter, selecting the workload fault-tolerance approach, and then determining the initial size of the Dynamic Datacenter.

Step 2: Design the Virtualization Hosts. The goal of this step is to design hosts that meet the capacity, performance, placement, and fault-tolerance requirements of the organization.

Step 3: Design the Software Infrastructure. The focus of this step is to design a management infrastructure that supports the Dynamic Datacenter. List the requirements needed by each component and then design the corresponding Microsoft offering.

Step 4: Design the Dynamic Datacenter Storage Infrastructure. This step involves designing the storage infrastructure for the Hyper-V hosts in the Dynamic Datacenter.

Step 5: Design the Network Infrastructure. This step involves designing the physical network switches to provide redundancy and fault tolerance. Also, this step focuses on designing the load balancer types and quantities, as well as the firewalls, if required by the business.